The company behind Adblock Plus is acquiring micropayment service Flattr

That's like saying all the hotel companies should come together and form a company to compete with Expedia and Orbitz. But the hotel companies did exactly that, when they formed a joint venture to run RoomKey.com. And the team at RoomKey built some amazing technology. But the various hotel companies, who jointly owned the joint venture, fell to fighting and they starved RoomKey.com of money and independence. So RoomKey.com could have transformed the space for booking hotels, but RoomKey was sabotaged by its owners. Which turns out to be a very common story for joint ventures -- each partner has its own internal politics, and when they form a joint venture the result is complete dysfunction.

The moral of the story is: never underestimate the short-term greed and stupidity of big companies, and their ability to sabotage their own self-interest.

So don't expect the major publishers to have much success launching their own subscription service.

Most internet content is just plain free. So people value it that way.

You can probably get people to subscribe to a WSJ/NYT/Local Paper subscription. But people probably won't pay for anything but the highest quality stuff they've long been conditioned to pay for. "Vox? Sorry but, I'd pay for blogs"

About:

> If the WSJ and WaPo shared subscribers, the consumers would get double the content while the industry costs would stay the same. When consumers see additional value for their subscription dollars, they are more likely to sign up, increasing the number of potential customers.

The problem is paywalls. Both need paywalls to improve their revenue.

I have a protocol which covers both paywalled and unpaywalled sites. For the purposes of attracting ire, I applied for a US patent, which will hopefully land in the next month or two (I already hold an Australian one).

Then, I suppose, it will be time to ask rich people for money so I can make them richer.

Edit:

To expand a bit, consider that all the existing successful schemes are walled gardens. App stores are walled gardens, Netflix is a walled garden, Spotify is too.

But the web is, by its nature, an open garden.

What I developed, effectively speaking, allows users to support websites without paywalls, or to be passed through a paywall, without ever noticing the difference. All they'd notice is the absence of ads on participating websites.

I went and talked to quite a lot CEOs in the news business. What i found is: the publishers don't care about their users. All they care about is not to cooperating with other publishers. That means, if you have a service that automatically gives each publisher a bit of money when you read their article. No publisher will join.

The free sites (pornhub, redtube and alikes) around use a different model though, where they make money from a side business of real time video chat, where you can tip the model with coins you buy in bulk, like a mobile game where you buy in-game currency.

I couldn't avoid making a comparison to the publisher business. Porn is just so much more efficient and advanced.

I would probably never pay a $5 subscription for WSJ, NYT or WaPo. But a $20 that gives me access to any news site online or even a $15 that gives me access to a good set of them now that's something I can wrap my head around.

https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-w...

Users subscribe for $20/month (and that is their cap). And each page they visit they get dinged $0.01 (etc) and they have no risk of going over their cap.

When they hit a page with ads, the publisher site hides ads if they get paid $0.01, but they display ads if the users account is down to zero for that month.

This is really bad and painful, and these service providers know that as well. But they still do it, so there must be a good reason for it.

I just suspect that abo is not the best way to make money because it also limits how much the user spends each month. For instance there may be a few months I don't spend a single cent on Steam (the computer game webshop/package manager), but when I spend, I spend a lot more than in a year of using Netflix. And even if I'm excited about Netflix, I can't give them more money (I have the biggest abo already).

Therefore I would say making money is not about the payment but about the sales process. It must be fun to buy and increase your excitement, then you'll buy more, maybe even unreasonable much. That's also why Kickstarter probably makes more money than Flattr. They enable and enforce good sales tactics with videos, picture driven articles and easily shared Kickstarter pages, while Flattr is only a button on another person's freely structured page. One increases excitement, the other doesn't.

On the other hand I never felt like clicking the flattr button. But as things are now I prefer to opt in after reading a good article than ending up on some actual fake news by mistake and knowing I contributed to make them rich.

That is without even talking about the problem (in my opinion) that even the more innocent subscriptions (music, tv, movies) have with stuff like geo restrictions and exclusives...

And to be clear, I use uBlock Origin because ABP's idea of trusted publishers would be stupid even if it was not a shakedown business

I'm inclined to agree. Clearly we're not alone in that sentiment, if you check the responses to their ill-conceived Twitter poll.

Ads suck but they are the defacto revenue model for the contemporary internet. Micropayments struggle partially because of the network effect... websites don't integrate because there aren't enough customers, and there aren't enough customers because most websites don't offer micropayments!

ABP could help establish a sustainable micropayment model for the broader internet, and ultimately help increase privacy by addressing that root cause (revenue). Their customer base is significant and the value proposition of "micropayments vs nothing" is much more compelling than "micropayments vs ads". Imagine if Google adopted the same standard with Google Wallet, Youtube, and native Chrome/Android support...

That said, I will continue using uBlock Origin in the mean time. Much faster than ABP :)

uBlock Origin is my recommendation as well.

Links:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/ublock/

However, it relies in part on a particular HTTP header, so from an information theoretic standpoint it will dramatically narrow the pool of candidates. Good enough for an individual who doesn't want to be profiled for advertising, not good enough for someone worried about advanced persistent threats.

Edit: another cool facet to this idea would be that you don't have to hound end users to join, the content providers that sign up will do that for you :)

Edit round 2: looks like brave.com already does exactly this.

I want my fixed monthly "internet content subscription" divided between things I read that month, with the option to veto things that turned out to be clickbait and to allocate more to articles that I found exceptionally valuable.

Participating recipients could have an "Add us to your PatronPie" button on their sites that would give them a small, adjustable default slice. Patrons could edit their slices and monthly amount at any time. Monetization was easy, I just transparently took a percentage of each month's transactions by having a set slice of pie permanently pre-allocated to PatronPie.

I suspended the project when I discovered how hostile credit card companies are about letting an entity move funds in this way. Obviously it's possible to get special permission, as there are companies that do it, but I lacked the time and resources to push through the hassle barrier.

EDIT: Brave also focuses on privacy and ad blocking. It's also already released.

The only reason I can imagine they haven't done this already is that they're mired in endless bureaucratic debates about whether this should be bundled with Prime... -_-

The only beef I really have with the Acceptable Ads program is that, since it doesn't discriminate based on ad content, only ad format, occasionally it will let through an ad where the presentation isn't annoying, but the content is. (E.g. A small static image ad that wouldn't normally be obtrusive, except it features a picture of a half-naked woman and the type of clickbaity text you'd expect to see on the cover of a tabloid.)

For instance, WSJ endlessly sticks paywall for recycled news.

Some journalists risk their lives for the sake of jouranlism.

https://magazine.atavist.com/he-always-had-a-dark-side

This was posted a while back on HN and we talked about how to support such journalists that take actual risks which needs to be rewarded.

Not really a fan of both, as pretty much any hobby project that tried to monetize with Patreon lost its soul. If something is free and suddenly they want money for it, even if there are free alternatives that usually doesn't work. To each their own, some probably like it. I avoid reoccurring monthly costs, where possible and prefer one time costs or just good old advertisement.

But I wasn't able to get Flattr to accept my credit card. Wasn't sure if it was because they are Sweden-based and I am in the US, as I didn't keep trying.